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He also turned up the pressure on the government to release its budget figures early, saying it was, in effect, trying to shorten the campaign by keeping the figures secret. Mr Beazley said the government had spent an extra $20 billion in the past year as it tried to cling to office. "Government ministers have been spending like drunken sailors in recent times, he said.
He said Prime Minister John Howard knew he had no money for the classic tax cut distraction beloved of the Liberal leadership. "So we get a pretend tax cut, one that can only be delivered with a rise in the GST," he said.
Mr Howard's plan was to slash non-GST funds from the states money that would go to schools, hospitals and roads - until the states came begging for a GST rise. Mr Beazley said all Labor's plans would be laid out when the true state of the budget was known.
But the government was refusing to release the figures until the last moment. "This is totally unacceptable," he said. "Let's end the phoney war.
He said the government could release the figures in a week, allowing the political battle lines to be drawn and the Australian people to make a choice.
Mr Beazley made no mention of a vocal rally outside the conference, where Oscar nominated actor Rachel Griffiths likened logging Tasmania's old-growth forests for wood chips to turning the Sydney Opera House into rubble for driveways.
"It just does not make sense," she told the thousands at the rally.
Ms Griffiths saw her first clearfelled and burnt logging coupe yesterday, when she visited the Styx Valley, home of dozens of giant eucalypts including the world's tallest hardwood tree. Some of the giants are earmarked for logging in a process that yields some sawlogs, but mainly woodchips. "Tasmania seems to be a place that has some of our nation's best crown jewels, to use a non-republican term, and I appeal to more mainlanders to come down and to see what's here," she said.
The Styx Valley is the focus of a campaign by the conservation movement
to create a new national park.
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